Peter Chung Takes ‘the Big Risk’ With CGI-Animated Firebreather

Infamously risky but rewarding animator Peter Chung has finally made a film for everyone in Firebreather. If his new all-CGI movie is a hit on Cartoon Network, the Aeon Flux creator hopes it will reassure Hollywood that the time is right to pull the trigger on other adult-oriented animated movies.

"If and when Firebreather becomes accepted, it will open up the possibilities," the Korea-born but California-based Chung told Wired.com by phone. "I do find that the studios are saying that they want to do something different, but no one really wants to be the first to take the big risk."

A genre-busting mash of sci-fi, Kaiju fantasy and teen soap along the lines of Genndy Tartakovksy's similarly brilliant Sym-Bionic Titan, Firebreather is a great test of Chung's double-edged talent.

Based on Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn's short-lived comic of the same name, Firebreather's teen protagonist, Duncan, is the offspring of a mild-mannered human mother, Margaret, and the beastly Belloc, a 60,000-pound dragon better known to a shocked and awed Earth as the King of Monsters.

Margaret and Belloc's carnal knowledge is something Duncan doesn't want details on, as one hilarious scene illustrates, but the cross-species sexual union fits perfectly with Chung's previous adult-oriented explorations in daring animated series like Aeon Flux and Reign: The Conqueror, as well as Ralph Bakshi's cult fantasy film Fire and Ice, one of Chung's earliest animation gigs.

Similarly, Firebreather, which debuts Wednesday on Cartoon Network, finds Chung striking a confident balance between breathtaking action sequences, ranging from parkour chases to full-scale military and supernatural warfare, and the subtle shot-blocking that infuses the film's quieter moments with relatable psychodrama.

Not bad, considering Firebreather is Chung's first CGI feature film, and that he had zero exposure to the comic prior to starting the project. From designing the main humanoid and demonic characters to effortlessly directing Firebreather's incendiary action and tender relationship sequences, Chung has proven he can do it all, for any target audience.

If the show's a hit, more Firebreather films or even a television series could follow. Wired.com picked Chung's imaginative brain on that heated possibility, the prospects of selling risky work to conservative Hollywood and much more in the interview that unfolds in the gallery above.

Wired.com: How did you get involved with Firebreather?

Peter Chung: I've been trying to get something produced at Cartoon Network for a while. They liked my ideas but they were not doing the kinds of films that I wanted to do, which are skewed towards older audiences than they are used to. So I stopped thinking about them. Then, all of a sudden they called me and told me they had a script and thought it was perfect for me. Chances like that don't come along often; it's an unusual project in terms of its tone and story. So I signed up right away.

Wired.com: Were you familiar with the comic before you became attached to the project?

Chung: No, I wasn't. The comic was not that well-known, which I hope is going to change. But that freed me up considerably, which wouldn't have happened if it was something well-known like Batman or Spider-Man. The characters didn't have a really long history, either. So as we were embarking on the movie, the comic was still coming out and the story was still developing. So it really felt like we were participating in the creation of the characters and the world. And the creators have been really supportive, and enthusiastic about the result.

Wired.com: Did you have any input into the character design? The humans have the long, lean, athletic look of your characters from Aeon Flux and Reign.

Peter Chung: Yeah, I did do the main character design: Duncan, Belloc, Margaret, the Kaiju monsters and others.

Chung: Yeah, Belloc was by far the hardest character to design. He does look a lot different in the comic. But he needed to do a lot of emoting and a lot of dialog. And you had to believe that Margaret would have loved him; he had to be sexy and he had to be seductive.

My solution to getting that part of him to merge with his monstrous side was to have his face morph. So when you see him on all fours, he's more like a dinosaur; that's more like his Kaiju battle mode, when he's fighting tanks and so on. And when he's standing up, that's when he's more humanoid.

Wired.com: Watching his face phase in and out was a cool CGI trick.

Chung: It was deliberate, but I'm glad that it wasn't something that drew attention to itself. I didn't want it to seem like it was magical or supernatural. In the original story, there were elements of that, where he actually transformed into a human. I wanted to get away from that.

Wired.com: Speaking of sexy Kaiju, after watching Firebreather with my wife, I asked her what she'd want to ask you. And she wanted to know how Belloc had sex with Margaret, which Margaret actually brings up with Duncan (above) in a hilarious scene.

Peter Chung: [Laughs] Well, I don't want to give a definitive answer. It's their private business. I don't know myself, but everyone asks that question. So rather than try to pretend it doesn't exist, the screenwriter Jim Klieg came up with a nice piece of dialog.

Wired.com: Do you find it somewhat liberating, especially in our current so-called reality television age, that you can play with humor, cross-species sex and other out-there subject matter in animation, which is still, maddeningly enough, considered mostly a kids' medium?

Chung: It's a freedom of a different kind. You have a lot more freedom in that you have a lot less creative restraints and you're able to take more chances. People aren't freaked out that you're trying to do something different. Cartoon Network was great in terms of letting me make the film I wanted to make. I can't imagine making Firebreather at another studio.

Because we were venturing into a lot of unknown territory with this project, I didn't want the characters to feel real or motion-captured, although it is a fairly realistic story and style. That was also a challenge, to come up with a design that was somewhere between realism and caricature. Especially since so much of the story revolves around appearances, the way Duncan looks and changes. I think we did it.

Wired.com: I think it's cool that Cartoon Network gave you that latitude. My feeling is that you let the visionaries play, and let the chips fall where they may.

Peter Chung: They had a lot of directors that they could have chosen, so I took the fact that they chose me to be the director as a sign that they wanted my style of film. And I kept pushing and pushing, and there were some battles along the way. But I felt like the film turned out better than any of us could have expected, considering that it was my first CGI feature and I was working quickly with people I've never worked with before.

Wired.com: I think it especially paid off in the action, which is fairly breathtaking.

Chung: But the thing is that the action is carefully set up so you feel what the stakes are. That's why it's engaging and compelling. You can have the most elaborately staged and impressively mounted action sequences, and still not care what's going on, because you don't feel invested in the characters or story. For me, having done this for a long time, the action scenes were the least-challenging parts. Those are going to be interesting no matter what, monsters fighting monsters. It's hard to make that uninteresting, unless you're really lousy. But I paid a lot of attention to blocking the quieter moments, which had the potential to be boring, especially in animation.

Wired.com:Firebreather has a demographic baked into it, given that it takes place in high school. But do you think it transcends that demographic to appeal to viewers comfortable with more mature, philosophical work?

Peter Chung: That was a challenge, because I knew Cartoon Network was aiming for a target audience that wasn't the same as Aeon Flux. And I hate to say this, because of what it says about my other work, but Firebreather really is a film that is for everyone. I did think a lot about my teenage years, and really tried to connect with Duncan and his problems.

So I let that be my guide: What kind of character would I want to be in high school? And the rest of it was trying to craft a well-structured story, which sounds kind of generic. But in the end, you just have to use all the methods of good filmmaking at your disposal. I really tried to push the way that scenes were blocked and staged, which is a little unusual for CG animation. I come from a 2-D background, and I'm really influenced by Japanese animation, where you really have to get creative with your staging and camera work. And I think applying 2-D creativity to CG comes across as being very fresh.

Wired.com: Did you find any difficulty translating your style to CG?

Chung: For me, it was remarkably easier than it would have been in 2-D. It was very liberating. I've been wanting to do CG for a long time, but the fact is that it would have been impossible to make this film on this budget even two years ago.

Wired.com: The film gives the impression that there is a series hiding behind it. Have there been any discussions to that effect?

Peter Chung: Yeah, we're definitely trying to launch a series. We're talking about developing more stories, but whether they will take the form of a series or another movie hasn't been decided yet. I think the good stuff is yet to come. We spent a lot of time establishing the characters and the world. It's the burden of any origin story; there's a lot of groundwork.

Wired.com: Well, I think more of anything would be great. Firebreather is a great example of programming that transcends the restrictions of sci-fi and fantasy, and we could use it.

Chung: Well, just make sure to include those kinds of comments in your article. That will help make it happen!

Wired.com: What else are you working on?

Peter Chung: One project I've been trying to get done for a while is an animated Aeon Flux feature. That's the only project I can talk about now, and also the one that was closest to being done, until the Aeon Flux live-action film came out and didn't do very well. That would be the one that is the most ready to go.

Wired.com: Is that 2-D or CGI?

Chung: At this point, it would be a CGI film, now that I've done Firebreather. I have some other projects that I've been developing. It's always been hard for me to sell the projects that I want to do in Hollywood, as you can imagine. But having this is definitely going to help, because I think it shows people what is possible, using animation in a dramatic form rather than doing something that's gag-driven.

Wired.com: What's the nature of Hollywood's blowback? You've got a pretty impressive rap sheet, from mature, influential series like Aeon Flux to moving one-shot intellectual exercises like Matriculated from The Animatrix (above), which is my favorite thing you've ever done.

Peter Chung: My work has a following. But I think from the studios' perspective it's still pretty risky, and not perceived as being as mainstream or commercial as the other things they have available to produce. I think that if and when Firebreather becomes accepted, it will open up possibilities. But I also think that past attempts by other studios to create adult-oriented animation, like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Titan A.E., haven't done so well. But I do find that the studios are saying that they want to do something different, but no one really wants to be the first to take the big risk.

Wired.com: Right, but the person who ends up taking the risk usually makes history. This was the deal with Star Wars, Star Trek and pretty much every major sci-fi and fantasy franchise in existence.

Chung: Yeah, exactly. People think they know what the public wants, but the public doesn't know themselves, until you show it to them. And once you do, they usually say, "Wow, I like this, even though I had no idea I was going to like this!" That's always going to be the way it is, because that's what it is to be original.